


brief notes on surviving the end of the world

by eudaimon



Series: South, South [2]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 17:36:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Brad is injured during an accident in Iraq, he and Nate begin a journey designed to clear the air between them after years apart. Some days are easier than others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	brief notes on surviving the end of the world

_Don't tell me I don't have no secrets_  
There's still a place I want to be  
There's still a path I haven't wandered  
But I'm afraid of where it leads 

 

**1\. Be prepared to leave everything behind.**

In the passenger seat, he cramps. There's plenty of leg room, but that isn't the point. The point: Nate is taking it slowly, delicately, driving so as not to jar him and Brad was made for faster things. It's harder or easier to forgive, depending on how much pain he's in. This morning, stretching for something just out of reach, he blew two stitches. Still Marines in their bones, they made do. The result: Nate smiles sunnily sometime in the morning and Brad hates him for it. It sits greasy and unpleasant in the pit of his stomach. Even with no breakfast in him (fast food, summarily refused), the point comes when he reaches out, meaning to grab Nate's hand on the gear-stick but clutching him by the upper thigh instead. The heat of Nate's body, even through heavy denim, is startling.

"Okay?" asks Nate and Brad just shakes his head. Once, in Mesopotamia, they developed a complicated language of looks more through necessity than design, but Brad has no cipher for the look that Nate's giving him when he's done dry-heaving bile onto the shoulder of the dusty road.

By the time he gets back into his seat, his mouth is sour and dry and there's blood seeping through his t-shirt on one side. It's black, so it doesn't show, but Brad presses his palm there and the next look, the look that Nate gives him as he holds out the bottle of water with the top already unscrewed, is more familiar. Brad rinses his mouth out and spits.

That look is _get out of the hole, Brad_.

Two things that Brad never learned to say in Arabic: _fuck you_ and _I'm in love with you even though you drive me mad._

He screws the cap back onto the bottle. They continue on.

*

**2\. Expect the unexpected - always.**

"We're going to talk about this." 

He's sitting on the balcony of the shitty little motel somewhere near Los Mochis. They're about a day past the border. The view's a building site. The beer is crisp and cold.

"What?" he asks, suddenly weary. Some days (and this was true in the desert, too), everything about Nate Fick is exhausting. He isn't always an easy man to be around; he might not excite like Ray or expound like Poke or even fucking incite like Rolling Stone, but the fact remains: it is fucking exhausting to consistently find yourself wanting by somebody else's example. Even now, Nate's standing there in the cool of the evening with clean dressings in one hand and his hair carelessly brushed to one side by fingers and he looks so perfect that all Brad can think about is _no fucking wonder I didn't hear from you in years_.

He sips from his beer.  
Nate looks at him expectantly. Brad stands up on cue. 

He brings the beer.

He's half sitting in the tub and half out of it, lukewarm water sluicing down his ribs, washing away the blood on his side before Nate says anything else.

"Want to tell me what the fuck you're so angry about, Brad?" asks Nate, leaning in with a swab soaked in Iodine. He doesn't warn Brad that it's going to sting. He doesn't apologise when it does. Not for the first time, Brad remembers all of the myriad ways in which Nate Fick has ever failed to give. like it isn't quite possible for him to yield. Not for the first time, Brad finds himself furious at whoever bred the steel into Nate Fick's spine.

He shrugs and instantly regrets it.

"I watched three Marines bleed to death at the side of the fucking road, Nate." He snaps it out because he doesn't know how to accurately articulate the relief that it wasn't Ray's cracked skull that he'd cradled in his lap, doesn't know how to succinctly convey the terror that he feels when he dreams of joining his team. Army Psychiatrists have told him that grief is the appropriate response.

He knows enough to know that grief is not what this is.

"Fuck that," spits Nate, shaking his head. "That isn't what we're talking about here, Brad, and you know it. Don't you dare use that to hide from me. You're better than that."

The clipped fury of his tone is incongruous against the neat movements of his hands as he pats Brad's wound dry. Even when he's so far into pissed that he's using a tone that Brad only ever heard him use with Griego, he's still fucking incapable of not taking care.

Brad stares at his hands. Nate has beautiful hands. How many times has Brad had that exact same thought and when has he ever been anything other than utterly helpless in the face of it? He wonders if it would be possible to grow immune to Nate, given time. He wonders if it would be possible to hate him for long enough for it to grow into indifference.

He wonders how long he's been hiding from Nate, and if Nate even knows.

He sits there for a long time, arm raised at an unnatural angle while Nate tapes the new dressing into place. It's exhausting in ways Brad was not anticipating. It's done. It'll do. He gently pushes Nate's hands away.

"Fuck, Nate," he says, finally, voice thick, so exhausted that he feels drunk on it. "You couldn't have given me more than twelve fucking hours?"

Nate stares. Brad wonders how those big, pretty green eyes affect Harvard girls. Nate's hands are moving again, packing things away. Supplies are precious; it's a long way to where they're going.

"No," says Nate, finally, just when Brad's sure that he won't say anything at all. "Go to bed, Brad. You look like shit."

It ought to be funny. More than anything, he's tired enough to weep.  
For the first time in his life, he gives in to it without a fight.

He sleeps deeply, and he doesn't dream.

*

**3\. Roll with the punches. Come up fighting. Especially when you have nothing left to lose.**

Somewhere in one of the packs, there plaid pyjama pants, but he sleeps in t-shirt and boxer briefs. The windows are thrown open to the purple evening. He's dreaming about Iraq again; no pain, but a sensation of looseness in his side; blood soaking into the leg of his MOPP suit; the futile attempt to keep together the fragments of a human skull with nothing but a bandanna and ten fingers; the tin slips away from his hand again.

He wakes up breathing hard; he must have sounded because Nate's sitting on the near-side of the bed. Nate reaches out and presses on hand against Brad's chest. The thin cotton of his t-shirt is soaked through.

"Let me help," he says.  
 _You can't help. You weren't there_.

The tangle of damp cotton puts them close again. Nate leans in and catches his weight against the headboard. Their mouths are so close that Brad can feel Nate's breath moist on his lips. Nate's had at least one beer; Brad can almost taste it.

"It had to be over that quickly Brad," he's saying. "I couldn't let you do that. I wasn't going to be the reason your life went to shit." _We both deserve better than that._

Five years ago, for twelve hours, everything had been, if not _perfect_ , then really fucking good. Brad had leaned in to kiss Nate in a bar, been stopped with a firm hand on his chest but, later, there had been a hotel room bed, no fucking but almost everything but. In Brad's memory, it tastes like champagne and come, both spilt onto Nate's fair skin and sucked clean. He remembers the way that lube had shown on thighs and bellies, smeared by careless fingers. He remembers the dead weight of Nate's head on his arm while he slept.

Twelve hours later, Nate had been gone without trace. On the pillow, a cloth tab torn from a uniform jacket, stencilled C A P T. F I C K and a note so short that it was barely there.

> TALK SOON. SEMPER FI. - N.

Not insult. Not injury, either. Just a sense of loss so vague that it hadn't even felt like it belonged to him at all.

Right now, though, Nate is hot and close and still leaning in. And they both know that everything's different now. Everything's changed. For a moment, when the Humvee flipped, before the world came crashing down, Brad had felt weightless.

Nate leans in and kisses him, off-centre and sloppy, a little stale from the beer but no less good for it, and Brad hears the beginning of a moan which he stifles against Nate's lips.

"I want to fuck you," he mumbles. "I want you to fuck me."

Nate's in the process of stripping off his t-shirt. He appears ruffled but deadly serious.

"Stitches, Brad. Nobody's fucking anybody."  
In a very real way, Nate is always going to outrank him, but he'll heal, given time and space, open to the air.   
And it's a long way to where they're going.

Brad reaches out with a hand that might always tremble to cup the heavy, definite outline of Nate's cock through his sweatpants. Nate bites his lip, shifts to carefully straddle Brad and Brad lifts one knee, on which he might always limp, to press his thigh against Nate's ass.

"Get yourself off for me," he says, finally. "Make yourself come."  
It's a challenge, as much as it's anything. And Nate's a Marine, before he's anything else.

"Right here?" Nate shifts his hips, pushes into Brad's hand with intent.  
"Right there," says Brad, his eyes drifting to where his hand is working Nate's rapidly stiffening cock, the other coming to rest on Nate's hip to make his exact intent clear. "Get naked first, though."

He lies back against the pillows and watches as Nate rearranges himself. There's something entirely glorious about Nate Fick completely naked (Brad can count on the fingers of one hand that times that he saw Nate barefoot during OIF, and never, ever without a shirt). The freckles across Nate's collarbones are a continued and particular delight. 

Nate straddles him again, bare ass against Brad's thigh. Every moment is a little bit of a fumble; they're rushing to make up for lost time. It's all been on hold for five years and now they can't quite catch up to the momentum of their desires.

Brad wants to believe that there'll be other times after this, times when they can allow themselves to slow down.

Without being prompted, Nate curls his fingers around his cock and begins to stroke. As an afterthought, he lifts his hand, spits and goes back to it. Brad feels his own dick twitch. He hasn't had a full hard-on since the bomb. Navy Psychiatrists tell him that it's a natural response to trauma, just like that grief that he isn't quite feeling.

He doesn't recall asking Navy Psychiatrists their opinion.  
He did call Doc Bryan. A pause on the end of the line, something that sounded like a huff of laughter. 

_Give it time, man. As long as it's still attached to you, you fuckin' asshole, it'll come back._

"Tell me what you think about," demands Nate, and Brad's got five years of this to spill. He runs his mouth about bare-backing and bondage, sex toys and good old fashioned getting to fuck Nate any time he wants. Getting to be fucked. He runs his hands along the taut lines of Nate's thighs, eyes drawn to his fingers and his cock, everything about him beautiful. Nate rocks forward, steadying himself with his free hand, looking to be kissed, but Brad pushes him back with fingers against his chest. He wants to be able to watch every moment of this, from beginning to end. Nate is developing a beautiful sort of tremble through his limbs, the closer he gets. He takes hold of Nate's wrist, licking two fingers into his mouth, sucking them wetly and Nate takes the hint, slipping that hand back to trace and tease. Brad watches the way his face changes.

"How close are you?"

A flicker of a smile.

"Really fucking close."  
"What do you need?"  
"Tell me something else."

He keeps his hands on Nate's thighs, steadying him. The movement of Nate's hips jars his side, but Brad doesn't give a shit. He thinks for a long moment.

"I want those twelve hours again," he says, quietly. "I want to do all of that to you again, lick every inch of you, touch you everywhere but then I want to fuck you. I want to fuck the shit out of you and then I want you to put me on all fours and I want to go again. I want you inside me. I want that desperately, Nate."

Nate's eyes are wide and green and fixed on Brad's face. They widen and he scrambles back on his heels so that, when he comes, he comes hot across his fingers and Brad's belly and, before Brad actually knows what's happening, Nate's scrambling down his mouth and tongue hot against Brad's skin as he licks him clean. It's the single hottest thing that he's ever seen.

But they've got time, to heal and grow, and it's a long, long way to the place that they're going.

*

**4\. Begin again.**

In the morning, they're ready to go south again. Nate points the car towards Guadalajara. Brad falls asleep watching him drive.


End file.
